At 2:37 PM +0000 9/2/02, Ian Hickson wrote:
>We're not talking about what _we_ know. We're talking about what a
>compliant UA knows. And per the specs, that would be strictly nothing.
>
There's more than one user agent. My user agent may well be doing
something very different than your user agent is doing. I claim there
is meaning in the data even if a particular user agent cannot make
use of that meaning.
You claim, "the class attribute is exactly the same as XML tag names
in unknown namespaces -- UAs can have no clue what they mean." I
disagree. I think UAs can have clues as to what they mean. That can
be hard coded in. It can be derived by Google searches or by asking
the user to supply further information, or it can be provided by
expert systems, and this is just a start. Most UAs today may not do
this, and that's OK. But UAs can take advantage of extended
information if their developers design them to.
Most UAs today are quite stupid, but that's by design. It's not a
fundamental aspect of the Web or HTML. For a simple example, that's
clearly implementable today, imagine a user agent that allows the
user to select an element such as <SINGER>Madonna</SINGER> and
request more information on that through Google. It can search for
"SINGER Madonna" instead of just "Madonna" and thus get more useful
information back. Or imagine using the Open Directory Project instead
of Google. Then the UA could search for Madonna within the Arts:
Music: Vocal: Singers category instead of the entire database. You
could not do this with merely <span>Madonna</span> because the span
element does not contain as much information as the SINGER element.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
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| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
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